Roger Smith - Mixed Blood

Benny Mongrel knelt down beside Bessie. She was gasping for air, trying to get up, her claws scratching at the cement, her crippled hips sagging under her weight.

He stroked her and crooned softly. “Easy, Bessie. Easy, old thing. Easy now.”

Burn took a beer from the fridge. Mrs. Dollie, the middle-aged domestic worker, was chatting in the kitchen with Matt. Mrs. Dollie had come with the house. At first Burn had wanted to get rid of her, not wanting a stranger in their lives. But Susan had felt sorry for the woman, and they decided to keep her on.

She was short and skinny with olive skin and gray hair that escaped in tendrils from beneath her Muslim headscarf. She looked frail but was not. Burn had seen her effortlessly moving furniture as she vacuumed. She spoke rapid-fire English with the local accent that had Jack and Susan esiually asking her to repeat herself. Which she did, with a great show of patience, as if, shame, it wasn’t these foreigners’ fault they were so slow, was it?

Matt loved her and seemed to have no problem understanding her. He watched as she dusted the leaves of the potted plants in the kitchen.

“Now look it here, Matty, when youse is by the house and I’m not here, you must look nicely after the plants, okay?”

Matt nodded, earnestly. “I’ll water them.”

“Ja. Nicely. No matter what they say about water restrictions. A plant must get its water.”

Mrs. Dollie grabbed a bucket and a mop and headed to the tiled dining room, Matt trailing after her. Burn watched as she attacked the tiles energetically, her thin arms pumping as she mopped the area where the bodies had lain. He felt a moment of panic. Had he cleaned the blood properly? Had some of it caked in the grout between the tiles? But Mrs. Dollie noticed nothing. She never stopped chatting to the boy as she mopped, and he heard Matt laugh.

Burn walked away from the conversation, out onto the deck, sipping the beer. His son seemed okay, but how could he be? His world had been upended; he had been dragged across the planet and had witnessed something last night that he wouldn’t be allowed to watch on TV.

Burn stood drinking his beer, watching the sun sagging down toward the ocean. Unbelievably, it was less than twenty-four hours ago that those men had come.

The door buzzer sounded, startling Burn. He hesitated, instinctively wanting to ignore it. Then it sounded again. Whoever was down there kept his finger on the buzzer.

Burn walked across to the wall-mounted intercom monitor. On the screen he saw a huge man crowded into the street door recess. Burn picked up the phone.

“Yes, can I help you?”

The man held up an ID to the camera. “Police. Can I talk to you, please?” He had a guttural accent, hard to follow through the intercom.

Burn hesitated. “Okay. I’ll be right down.”

Burn felt sick in his gut.

He walked across to Mrs. Dollie and Matt. He ruffled his son’s hair. “I have to talk to somebody outside. You stay here, with Mrs. Dollie, okay?” Matt nodded.

Burn locked the front door to make sure that Matt couldn’t follow him and walked down the pathway.

Was this it? Was this where the whole thing ended?

He opened the street door.

Burn felt as if he were confronting a Table Mountain of fat. The cop was massive, tall and obese, and he stank, a mixture of acrid body odor and something vaguely medicinal.

“Can I help you, officer?”

“I’m Inspector Barnard.” The man’s body odor became a sweet memory when the force of Barnard’s halitosis hit Burn took an involuntary step backward.

Burn tried not to breathe. “Is there a problem?”

Barnard was squinting at him. “You American?”

“That’s right.”

“On holiday?”

“Yeah, I guess. We’re renting for a couple of months.”

“Nice part of town.” The cop smiled, showing yellow teeth beneath a mustache as bushy as a skunk’s tail.

“It is, yes. Look, Mr…?”

“Barnard. Inspector.”

“Inspector, is there something I can help you with?”

“Just routine, sir.” Barnard had a notebook out. “Can I have your name, please?”

“Hill. John Hill.”

“Mr. Hill, there have been a couple of break-ins in the area over the last few weeks. You notice anything out of the ordinary, maybe?”

Burn shook his head. “Nothing. No. This is a very quiet street.”

“Last night? You didn’t hear anything, or see anything unusual?”

“No. Sorry.”

Barnard was pointing at the red BMW. “You maybe see who was driving that car?”

“Sorry. Can’t help you.”

Barnard nodded, sucked his teeth. Then he fixed Burn with a stare. “You live here alone?”

“No, with my wife and son.”

“Okay. Can I maybe talk to your wife? See if she maybe heard something?”

“She’s in hospital.”

Barnard was looking interested. “Oh? What’s wrong?”

“She’s pregnant. A complication. We had to get an ambulance for her last night, in fact. I was pretty preoccupied with that, as you can imagine.”

“Of course, of course. Well, I hope she is going to be okay.”

“Thank you. She’s fine.”

“Okay, good.”

Burn stepped back, ready to shut the door. “Is there anything else?”

The fat cop seemed reluctant to leave. “No. Thanks.”

As Burn closed the door, Barnard put out a hand and gripped it. The door was going nowhere. “Mr. Hill, what hospital is she in?”

Burn studied the piggy eyes peering out at him from within the folds of fat.

“She’s in Gardens Clinic.”

“Maybe I can talk to the ambulance crew. They might have seen sv hYou have a good night now.” Barnard released the door and allowed Burn to close it.

Burn breathed easily for the first time, free of Barnard’s stench and the weight of his own terror. The cop had traced the car to the gangsters. Did that mean he had found the bodies?

Burn forced himself to calm down. He went back into the house and walked straight to the bottle of Scotch in the kitchen, poured himself a shot, and knocked it back neat. He felt like flattening the bottle, but he knew he couldn’t.

He had planning to do.

They were going to have to run again.

Barnard called in a tow truck to impound the BMW; then he drove away from wealthy Cape Town down to the flatlands he knew so well.

What Rikki Fortune and his friend Faried Adams had been doing up there on the mountain wasn’t difficult to imagine. They were predators. Always on the hunt. They had been down in Sea Point looking for a whore; then they had seen something as they cruised like shadows through that white suburb, something they desired. Animals like that, half out of their minds on drugs, never made plans. They acted on impulse. Raped. Murdered. Took what they wanted without thought.

But where were they?

Barnard drove to the Golden Spoon for his usual gatsby full house. It was dark by the time he walked out to his car, but the heat was still intense. He sat for a while, chewing like a hippo on a riverbank, washing the food down with the piss-yellow Double O.

Barnard had touched base with the cops at Sea Point police station. No violent crimes, home invasions, or murders had been reported in the last twenty-four hours. And they knew nothing about this John Hill.

Barnard thought about the American. There was something that worried him about the man, something he couldn’t name, something that nagged at him worse than the rash on his thighs.

Hill was hiding something. He was sure of it.

Benny Mongrel searched the black trash can and found a plastic container of potato salad. Next he found a half-eaten bar of Belgian chocolate. The greatest prize of all was a T-bone steak, cooked but uneaten.